This entrepreneur wants you to play mind games

To best serve their discerning and demanding clientele, the founders of Marbles: the Brain Store decided they needed to do more than find and sell brain-fitness games and toys: Often they had to invent them.

That task fell to Scott Brown, chief merchant and co-founder of Bucktown-based Marbles, a retailer dreamed up in a brainstorming session at Sandbox Industries Inc., a Chicago company that creates and funds new ventures.

Mr. Brown and CEO Lindsay Gaskins opened their first store just off North Michigan Avenue. Six years later, Marbles is the only chain of its kind in the U.S., with 27 locations and nearly $20 million in sales.

Marbles creates and sells attractively packaged, well-made games and toys that may improve players' critical thinking, memory, visual perception, coordination and word skills. Among its offerings: a Sudoku board using colors instead of numbers, roll the dice story cubes, a box of mind-bending wood puzzles.

“In the beginning we stocked fun and geeky,” says Ms. Gaskins, 37. “Now we know the scientific relevance of each product—how it activates the brain.”

Of course, a game played with a 99 cent deck of cards fires synapses, too. To thrive, Marbles must create, manufacture and retail things that make money.

“It has to be tactile, and it has to be social,” says Mr. Brown, 33, who has brought 70 products to market under the Marbles brand since 2010; 40 of those were developed in-house. They test and refine products in their stores and offer a new product competition annually for customers. Too, Mr. Brown checks Kickstarter projects for suitable products.

LEARNING FROM KIDS

Three years ago, Mr. Brown teamed with product design students at Columbia College of Chicago to create an all-ages brain-sharpening game, says the students' instructor, Carl Boyd. Several Marbles products came out of that course, including Colorfall, a $44.99 set of colored dominoes designed to fall into a recognizable shape. According to Mr. Boyd, Mr. Brown told the students, “The game should be quick to learn but take years to master.”

A native of Utah, Mr. Brown grew up in Bountiful, the second of four children. His father is an entrepreneur who develops time-management products; his mother is court clerk. Mr. Brown earned a bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University in American studies and business. He was, he says, a prankster and smart-aleck in high school.

Product ideas come from watching his three daughters play and from thinking back on activities that delighted him when he was a kid. The spark often comes from mashing two unlikely things.

Consider Brain Beats, a $21.99, two-disc set of U.S. presidents' names, state capitals, the periodic table and the quadratic formula set to rap music. How'd he come with it? Mr. Brown found himself bored in his car listening to nursery-rhyme music with his young daughters. So he hired musicians and had them set common memorization facts to a rap beat.

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